A Cluster Analysis of Attitudes to English in Germany and the Netherlands

Received: 19 April 2018 Revised: 29 August 2018 Accepted: 31 August 2018 DOI: 10.1111/weng.12348 PAPER A cluster analysis of attitudes to English in Germany and the Netherlands Alison Edwards1 Robert Fuchs2 1Leiden University Centre for Linguistics Abstract 2Institute of English and American Studies, University of Hamburg Although English is becoming increasingly entrenched in Western Correspondence Europe, large-scale comparative studies of attitudes among the gen- Alison Edwards, Leiden University Centre for eral public to this development are scarce. We investigate over 4,000 Linguistics, PO Box 9515, 2300 RA Leiden, Dutch and Germans’ attitudes towards English based on responses Netherlands. to an attitudinal questionnaire. Respondents saw English as a use- Email: [email protected] ful additional language, but not generally as a threat to their national language. Using k-means, an unsupervised clustering algorithm, we identified two attitudinal groups per country. Respondents with positive attitudes towards English, regardless of nationality, tended to be younger, urban, better educated and more proficient in English than their compatriots with more negative views of English. These within-country differences outweighed between-country ones, for example, that Germans were more confident in the status of their L1, whereas Dutch showed signs of ‘English fatigue’. The findings thus appear to confirm the previously identified divide between elite ‘haves’ versus ‘have-nots’ of English. 1 INTRODUCTION English is becoming increasingly entrenched in continental Europe, especially in Western and Northern European countries. This study focuses on Germany and the Netherlands, two countries where this development is particularly pronounced, especially in the latter given its smaller size and historical imperative to connect economically with the outside world (Ammon & McConnell, 2002, p. 98; McArthur, 1998, p. 106). What are people's perceptions of (the rise of) English, and how do views differ within and between these two countries? In exploring such attitudes, the ‘spokesman’ problem (Edwards, 2012) arises: ‘who is actually in a position to present or represent the views of the group as a whole’ (De Bot & Weltens, 1997, p. 145)? It is not self-evident that the attitudes expressed most vociferously in the media and policy debates reflect those on the ground generally. Indeed, they may be highly con- troversial views picked up by a sensationalist media or unusually conservative attitudes exploited for political ends. In This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. c 2018 The Authors. World Englishes Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd World Englishes 2018;37:653–667. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/weng 653 654 EDWARDS AND FUCHS an early study in France, for instance, Flaitz (1993) found that French ‘power elites’ (journalists, academics and public officials) were more negative towards English than the general public. While elite public discourse was characterised by calls-to-arms to protect French from the ‘invasion’ of English, the general public ‘did not seem to share the alarm of their more highly-placed compatriots with regard to the threat of English’ (Flaitz, 1993, p. 187). Similar findings have since emerged for Germany and the Netherlands. For reasons of space, we refrain from giv- ing a detailed description of the history and current spread of English in these two countries; such background has been provided elsewhere (Erling, 2004, 2007; Hilgendorf, 2001). In the specific context of language attitudes, however, opinion leaders in both countries regularly express concerns about the perceived inundation of English. In Ger- many, Erling (2004, p. 42) describes this as a ‘palpable’ fear. She cites the example of a language purification law pro- posed by the conservative Christian Democratic party (CDU) in 2001 ‘to stop the unnecessary use of Anglicisms […]in public domains all over Germany’ (Erling, 2004, p. 144). Although the bill did not pass, it received support from prominent politicians as well as numerous academics and linguists. She also discusses the establishment of the protectionist Verein Deutsche Sprache in 1997 ‘to protect the German language, German people, German nation and German culture from being overly influenced by Anglo-American language and culture’ (Erling, 2004, p. 148) (and which per- sists today in its attempts to influence public and political discourse on English in Germany). Yet, Erling found that such ‘macro-attitudes’ expressed by the media, politicians and protectionist groups are not necessarily reflected in the ‘micro-attitudes’ of people on the ground: even German university students of English, as in her study, placed great value on and recognised the importance of German as the national language. Other studies, focusing on university students at large, have also reaffirmed the general confidence in the status of German vis-à-vis English (Ammon & McConnell, 2002; Gnutzmann, Jakisch, & Rabe, 2015). Similarly, prominent voices in the Dutch media and public discourse regularly lament issues from the encroach- ment of English in education to the purported slavishness of the Dutch towards Anglo-American culture. Protectionist organisations such as the Stichting Nederlands propose alternatives for Anglicisms, while the rather vitriolic Stichting Taalverdediging Nederlands labels public figures who appear all too pro-English as ‘language traitors’ and compares the promotion of English to the Nazi occupation during World War II (Stichting Taalverdediging, 2009, p. 6). Although the members of such organisations have been described as ‘militants’ and in a ‘very small minority’ (Van Oostendorp, 2012, p. 260), they tap into a frequently cited public narrative that the Dutch take little pride in their own language and are all too willing to give it up (De Bot & Weltens, 1997; Groeneboer, 2002; Smakman, 2006; Van Oostendorp, 2012). De Bot and Weltens (1997), however, found no empirical support for this apparent lack of regard for Dutch. They surveyed the attitudes of Dutch, English, German and Turkish speakers living in the Netherlands towards their own and each other's languages. The Dutch participants showed no signs of undervaluing Dutch, rating it as their most important language (followed by English), while the immigrants considered it important to learn Dutch. The authors concluded that ‘there is simply no empirical evidence on the real or perceived threat of English or the position of Dutch in the Netherlands’ (De Bot & Weltens 1997, p. 146). Others examined the evaluation of English and Dutch job titles by Dutch university students (Van Meurs, Korzilius, Planken, & Fairley, 2007). They found that the students’ evaluations of the use of English ‘were not always as negative (‘odd’/‘exaggerated’) nor as positive (‘prestige-enhancing’) as those found in scholarly and more popular publications’, thus questioning to what extent ‘academics, advertising agencies, and opinion leaders […] can speak for “ordinary” language users’ (Van Meurs et al., 2007, p. 202). 2 THE PRESENT STUDY We are interested in: (i) testing the results of previous empirical work by means of a larger scale, cross-country study; and (ii) extending it by creating profiles of characteristic attitudes towards English in Germany and the Netherlands. Specifically, we use the clustering algorithm k-means (see further section 3.2) to identify patterns in the responses to an attitudinal survey with over 4,000 respondents. An earlier example can be found in Berns, De Bot, and Hasebrink (2007), who used k-means to investigate the pat- terning between the English proficiency of Dutch and German high school students and variables relating to their social EDWARDS AND FUCHS 655 background, media environment and contact with English. They identified roughly corresponding national groups with similar atttibutes: both countries had a large ‘mainstream’ group primarily exposed to English through music, an ‘educated’ group that also encountered English in the print media, a ‘culture-oriented’ group that engaged with English- language cinema, and a low-proficiency group with few contacts with English (Berns et al., 2007, pp. 97–101). The study showed that k-means is a promising method for clustering participants and identifying similarities and differences across groups. By making use of a larger dataset encompassing all population sectors, we are able to go beyond the smaller, more restricted samples of school or university students used in previous studies. The Dutch subset was used in a previous, somewhat impressionistic analysis seeking to group participants based on their attitudinal profiles (Edwards, 2016). These initial results tentatively identified a large ‘instrumental’ group, whose participants regarded English as personally important, but valued Dutch as well; and two peripheral groups: an ‘anglophile’ and an ‘anti- English’ group. However, the large, main group was very large indeed, whereas the two marginal groups, with their rather extreme views, accounted for only 7 per cent of people (after discounting overlap). The three groups accounted in total for slightly less than 80% of the dataset. Here, we set out to improve on that initial study by (i) employing a more statistically rigorous method that identifies the optimal number of distinct groups and places all

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